Super Tuesday

When you ask politicians to provide their favorite recipes, you can bet you’re going to get something laced, maybe dripping, with political undertones, because, well, because that’s what politicians do.   So when I asked two of Arizona’s most powerful pols, Senator John McCain and Governor Janet Napolitano, the former the current GOP frontrunner for president, the latter a trailblazer and potential candidate for vice president for the Democrats, I had to consider their selections a little bit more than just food.

I live in Arkansas though my political interests extend well beyond my state.  My husband Max and I have entertained politicians and their faithful followers on many occasions. In the South we open our homes for such events with no thought of using restaurants, hotels or any other such impersonal locations.  It was Bill Clinton this morning for breakfast with an enthusiastic group of Hillary’s supporters.  The southern spin on the menu included sausages in puff pastry and creamy cheese grits.  We boxed food for the road as President Clinton moved on to south Arkansas rallies.

I love politics but I love it mixed with creative decorations, food and some measure of frivolity.  I often incorporate enlarged political cartoons on my tables or hang funny caricatures and signs from the loggia ceiling.  I once had a word-game contest at a debate watching party.  Another invitation encouraged folks to bring their favorite cartoons so we could poll the guests for the best.  At one of the events we hosted during Wes Clark’s campaign, I mossed a topiary donkey for the centerpiece of the dining table and gave the food political names like “caucus canapés” and “primary pasta.”

When I strolled recently in Harvard Yard with my daughter Paris, she reminded me that these ivy- covered brick buildings were not only where she had bunked as a freshman, but also where the American Revolutionary War troops had slept before there were polls or primaries, or even elections, or even American Presidents.  I feel the political history when I’m in Cambridge.  

The Charles Hotel, where I stay when I can afford it or even when I can’t, is located off JFK Avenue, right by Harvard’s JFK School of Government.  This institution has amazing internationally and nationally renowned political leaders and thinkers drifting in and out hourly.  There is often a TV truck with protruding satellites illegally parked nearby.  Police motorcades noisily and regularly whiz by.  These lofty brick buildings overlook a square that features an outdoors local Boston favorite ‘Legal Seafood’ stand/bar during the warmer seasons, and an ice rink during the winter frost.  Sitting in that area, eating a great lobster roll and sipping chowder and tea or diet coke or even an occasional martini, I’ve spotted the likes of political columnist Maureen Dowd and Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Tribe.   

My first memory of a Presidential election was the Nixon/ Kennedy race. 

I was  8-years-old and the rally song to the tune of “Whistle While You Work” told me everything I thought I needed to know about politics:

 
Whistle While You Work
Nixon is a Jerk
Eisenhower has no power
Kennedy’s going to work.

Not very clever come to think of it. My folks were liberal Democrats and Kennedy was their man.

One of the prostitutes who lived across the hall from my wife and me was the person who introduced us to the Honey Lounge, a working class bar across the street from the Prudential Center in Boston.  She and her pimp had apparently had a small disagreement about money and she hid out in our apartment while he pounded on her door and threatened to kill her.  The following night, their dispute resolved, they brought us a pizza as compensation for our kindness.  The pimp said it was from the Honey Lounge, the best pizza in the city.

We thought so, too.  In the days before the elevation of pizza into some sort of fussy gourmet high art the Honey Lounge understood what its patrons wanted: more crust, more cheese, more tomato sauce, more meat and not an artichoke heart or a leaf of arugula in sight, served in a dark dingy room where we often got the added thrill of being the only yuppies in the place. And there was a bonus. The Honey Lounge also had the best donuts in town, incongruously light and fluffy, and from the first bite a permanent part of our weekend routine.

The revolutionary notion first took shape at – and as a result of – the Wild Hog Supper, an annual tradition held each January at the cavernous Georgia Freight Depot, virtually in the shadow of the Gold Dome of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, to celebrate the onset of the first session of the Georgia General Assembly, otherwise jokingly referred to as our Legislature.

The solons who convened here in this lively atmosphere – immediately prior to Super Tuesday – were uniformly filled with the full flush of convivial spirits: feed-and-seed dealers, clientless rural lawyers, insurance salesmen, chiropractors, "consultants," auto mechanics and lay preachers. And then, of course, there is the governor, Sonny Perdue, a veterinarian.

In 1960, you still had to be twenty-one to vote for president, so there it was, a first for me. And there was that sun-shiny John F. Kennedy, running for president against the perspiring "devil". My boy-friend (soon to be my husband but I didn't know it yet) and I invited the same group over to watch the returns that had been with us to watch the infamous tv debate.

We thought we were such hot shots.  People over for dinner.  Sitting on the floor.  Loads of beer and something we all seemed to like then– sangria. And chili.

Chili.  Something our mothers never made.  Something that was hip, and cheap, and could feed twenty people.  That's what we made the night of the debate, and that's what we were making again.  After all, we did have a big spaghetti pot.  And we had an assortment of un-matched soup bowls.  And almost all the spoons we would need.

Anchorage, Alaska has some of the best restaurants in the world. Especially if you like salmon. Years ago, I spent a summer in Anchorage-it was the Exxon Valdez trial, and it went on for months. I remember some things about the trial.

I remember everything about the dinners, which isn't particularly remarkable, as I had the exact same thing-in different restaurants-every night (except for this one place where I always ordered venison).

Dinner always started with Caesar salad, apparently an Alaskan favorite. The best was made table-side at the Marx Brothers Cafe. I was last there the first week of September 2001, when my son and I stopped in before being flown into the wilderness. (How we got out is another story.)